Are we entering a posthuman era? This course will focus on recent science fiction literature, along with a few films, that draw on current questions and concerns regarding what it means to be human. We will also examine key theoretical texts regarding technology and the posthuman. In the wake of the digital revolution we encounter both hopes that humans can achieve great things that would never before have seemed possible, along with fears that much of our understanding of what it means to be human is being eroded, even that “the human” may becoming superfluous. At the same time, humans are questioning the status of homo sapiens as the pinnacle of the living world, wondering if we are really such a special category of living organisms. Literary science fiction is a form of cultural representation in which many of these questions and ideas of the status of the human find expression. Representative science fiction authors include: H.P. Lovecraft, Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer, Kathe Koja, Michael Marrak, China Miéville, Neil Gaiman. Representative theorists include: Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles.

This course will examine how twentieth and twenty-first century authors have taken the experience of the broader world as their theme, demonstrating the various cultural, historical and global realities and issues that have impacted the production, circulation and reception of literary texts from around the globe in what is now called, World Literature. We will explore in a comparative manner how texts from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas have traveled through time and space to become part of the great shelves of Western Europe and the contemporary global literary market. Of particular interest to our study in this class will be questions about the practice of reading, translation and comparison in conjugation with the challenges and realities of the contemporary world, including migratory displacements, civil wars and populous revolt, environmental degradation and the rising spread of global pandemics.

We will focus in this course on literature of dark impulses and the irrational—on literature that we might specifically connect with psychanalysis. Psychoanalysis arose around the turn of the 20th century, during the height of the cultural period generally known as Modernism. In many ways cultural texts such as literature, the new medium of film, music, and the visual arts of the modernist period reflect questions, concerns, and issues that were also at the heart of psychoanalysis. It is not simply that culture was influenced by psychoanalysis—authors inserting Freudian ideas into their works, for example—but that all of these texts—scientific and cultural alike—reflected the issues, fears, and concerns of the era. In other words, we are concerned here with the “discourse” that arises in the years around 1900, particularly as it concerns the “psyche.” No German required.